Because of this Vogue-ish exterior, Didion (and especially her early writing) seems to leaves the deepest impression on girls, who are generally starved for examples of adult women who are simultaneously smart and desirable. But her crush factor (like her writing) does not age. I never fantasized about making my own skirt-suit, for example, until I read that Joan Didion wore a “sun-faded white sleeveless skirt-suit,” as Boris Kachka reported, “fashioned from the raw silk curtains in her old house in Brentwood.”

So vivid is Didion in the female public intellectual’s imagination, she appeared almost fully formed in Heather Havrilesky’s recent Bookforum review of Nora Ephron’s posthumous anthology, as a kind of icy foil to Ephron’s self-deprecating BFF schtick. “It’s oddly easy to imagine the two of them together,” Havrilesky writes, “Ephron making cheerful attempts to draw Didion out while Didion silently picks the sunflower seeds out of her salad.”